Relaxed, friendly Midtown bar offering excellent Cajun-style boils on the weekends during crawfish season.

2808 Milam St, Houston, TX 77006
(713) 523-7775
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6PM–2AM (Mon–Thu); 4PM–2AM (Fri, Sat); 4PM–12AM (Sun)

As big fans of Khon’s, we have been drinking at this bar for years, even before relocating to Houston in the summer of 2018. The owner, Khon Lu, is an enthusiastic supporter of the local art and music scenes, and several nights a week you can listen to live jazz and improvised music animating the tiny space. In the evenings, patrons spill out into the Mekong Center parking lot, where they lounge on beat-up office chairs and nurse their drinks around salvaged patio furniture and an old metal fire pit.

In addition to running one of the most relaxing drinking establishments in Houston, Khon is an excellent cook known to occasionally break out the grill to cook items like pork ribs for hungry patrons. However, it is his spring-time crawfish boils that draw the largest crowds, with folks re-appearing religiously week after week to indulge in his addictive crustaceans. Lately (April 2019), he has been boiling mudbugs on the weekend, on both Saturday and Sunday, beginning at about 5:30PM and continuing until they sell out (late for lunch, true, but we’ll stretch a point for crawfish).

Khon’s crawfish is legendary among the cognoscenti, so we have made the trek into Midtown to check them out—um, several times over the course of multiple consecutive weekends. Market price varies but never seems unreasonable, dropping as low as $6.50 per pound on a recent visit. You can either put the crawfish on your bar tab or pay Khon directly at his outdoor kitchen, where he typically offers a cash discount.

Khon uses a cooler-steaming method to cook multiple batches of crawfish during each boil. Each load of unlucky mudbugs is lowered into a pot of boil water seasoned with a mix of fresh chiles—jalapeño, serrano, and habañero—and cut lemons. After cooking for about 10 minutes, they are transferred to a large beer cooler where they are dusted with more Cajun seasoning and left to steam for another 10 minutes or so before being weighed and served with boiled potatoes, corn on the cob, garlic cloves, and (sometimes) mushrooms.

We unabashedly adore Khon’s crawfish and have been coming back again and again for these reasons:

• Quality control: Khon uses big, clean, healthy crawfish, and won’t cook unless he can get ‘bugs that meet his standards. On recent trips, they have reached massive proportions; if you like digging around in huge, fatty crawfish heads and performing the delicate surgery necessary for picking out the claw meat, Khon has you covered.
• Spice level: The spice-heat level draws a decent sweat without veering into the unbearable zone; so most people can comfortably consume pound after pound. Plus, popping some of the boiled chiles remains an option for fanning the flames.
• Habañeros: The trademark bouquet of this most bewitching of chiles wafts from the boiling pot and the fruity, but lethal essence of these baby orange lanterns permeates every nook and cranny of the finished product.
• Extra-deep flavors: A hint for the flavor hounds: the best time to eat these is after the first batch, when the boil water has become layered with the addition of many pounds of crawfish and chiles. Patrons have been spotted drinking the juice straight from the platter, and we heard the boil water makes a killer Bloody Mary. We also noticed Khon preparing mussels for himself in the cooking water at the end of a boil.

We are smitten with these crawfish, so much so that we have siphoned most of our April restaurant budget straight into the pockets of Khon’s battered overalls, which is just as it should be because his boils are honestly that good—to our taste anyway (we know people love to argue over crawfish at least as much as how to smoke brisket). We strongly suggest that you go and treat yourself to a plastic tray-full before the season ends.